Adapted from Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:

Localities need to crack down hard on the screeching, polluting use of gasoline-powered leaf blowers that make living in  many neighborhoods with lots of trees (which in New England means most neighborhoods)  miserable for weeks at time. No wonder people have come to blows over these machines, often wielded by “landscaping companies’’ staffed by illegal aliens.

Their homeowner customers are too lazy to pick up a rake for a little while, or hire a teen to do so, and too self-absorbed to think about the misery that  leaf blowers impose on their neighbors. More and more communities are banning these infernal machines. Many more should.

I’ve missed the sweet smell of burning leaves in the late fall, although the banning of leaf-burning was good for public health.